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Roma (2018; Directed by Alfonso Cuarón)

What is film for? For Academy Award-winning Mexican writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, it is a medium for complete sensory immersion, a complex machine for empathy, an ever-unspooling canvas for galvanizing, soul-shaking images. This is the form that the extraordinary, semi-autobiographical Roma takes, a technical wonder and a moving narrative of pain and healing, loss and love, confusion and despair and chaos and still silence (the kind that can be comforting, unsettling, terrifying, or all three at once). It is one of the year’s truly remarkable films, but it would be so in any year, at any point in the career of a filmmaker who, if he is not the world’s best at the moment, has vanishingly few challengers.

Shot in stunningly beautiful and tonally communicative black and white (Cuarón himself is the cinematographer), Roma is a slice-of-life story about Cleo (Yalitzia Aparicio), a live-in housekeeper for an upper-middle-class family in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighbourhood at the start of the 1970s. Cleo witnesses the quotidian struggles of the family that employs and loves her, and suffers her own tribulations and small joys alongside them. She watches as the family’s medical doctor patriarch (Fernando Gradiaga) leaves his wife (Marina de Tavira) and four children (Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta), joins the remaining family unit on vacations, and deals with her own crisis as an unplanned pregnancy coincides with the infamous El Halconazo (a.k.a. the Corpus Christi Massacre) of June 1971.

Roma is named for the Colonia Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City in which the family’s home is situated, but the tentative cinephile can’t help but speculate that the title might also nod to Federico Fellini’s 1972 film also called Roma. Cuarón isn’t quite one for Fellini’s Grand Guignol carnivalesque flair, but both the contemporaneous era and the aesthetic voyeurism of his camera lingering over tableaux of memory-soaked street and domestic settings suggests that Fellini’s work is intended as a reference point of artistic context. Roma is also largely constructed of Cuarón’s trademarked long takes, but the sequences of single-take cinematic bravado in Children of Men or Y Tu Mamá También or Gravity are here imbued with organic warmth and seemingly improvised (though no doubt minutely choreographed) naturalism.

Quiet interiors, bustling streetscapes, lively celebrations, buzzing countrysides and beaches all ache with visual poetry, given a varnish of historical shimmer by Cuarón’s own monochrome cinematography and his fundamental technique of foreground/background contrast. The director/DoP demonstrates with stunning simplicity how gorgeous and varied his colourless palate can be in the film’s first sustained shot during the opening credits: a fixed close-up of floor tiles in different grades of grey develops to include the reflection of a skylight in the puddle of water, undulating mop-pushed soap suds, and even the silhouette of a passing airplane. Roma may be shot in only two colours, but it feels like a rainbow.

It is also a masterclass in the application of film technique and its constituent elements in anticipating, elevating, and amplifying emotional beats. When oft-absent father Antonio returns home, his eager family must wait while he parks his too-big Ford Galaxie with exacting precision in the house’s carport; Cuarón shoots this everyday task with quick-cutting tension and humming sound to establish a picture of a man who cares deeply about things other than his loved ones. When Antonio leaves on another claimed work trip, his wife Sofia watches him drive away from their home (for the last time, as it turns out) as a cacophonous brass band marches disruptively past her on the street. A climactic moment of danger on a beach is teased through childish imaginative patter, and the potential fatal enormity of the event is imparted by the huge, flattening sound of the crashing ocean waves.

Film history and intertextuality, too, is employed by Cuarón in telling his story and giving it emotional contour. Cleo tells her martial arts enthusiast boyfriend Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) that she is pregnant by him in the back row of a movie theatre showing a screwy German war comedy; when he leaves, ostensibly to use the bathroom, the finality of his departure from her life (though they have two later meetings of a far more terse nature) is suggested by a fighter plane plunging through the sky on the movie screen. The family later attends another movie, 1969’s Marooned (which Cuarón has spoken about watching obsessively as a child, and an obvious influence on Gravity), and that film’s shots of astronauts adrift in the cold vastness of space approximates the existential uncertainty felt by Cleo as a future single mother and by the family in the absence of their father figure. Cuarón even references his own past work, namely a moment of both underlining and predicting during the El Halconazo sequence that recreates the imagery of maternal mourning of a dead, beloved son of Michelangelo’s La Pietà, much like a scene in Children of Men does.

This species of imaginative travel, for Alfonso Cuarón in Roma as much as (if not more than) anywhere else in his distinguished career, is what film is for. Critics toss terms of praise at any number of overwrought cinematic fantasies like “sweeps you up” and “transports you”, but Roma really does these things, only in a context of heightened realist fidelity. You are there in Mexico City in 1971, tracking past truckloads of bored riot cops ordered to sit on their hands and let paramilitary strike squads murder leftist protestors. You are there at an opulent hacienda haunted by the mounted heads of dead animals on New Year’s Eve, watching party guests and their children hurl buckets of water at a small forest fire while a costumed monster remove his false head and sings a mournful song (a moment of Bergman-esque art-film panache). And above all, you are there seeing the world through the eyes of a meek, ordinary housekeeper, the drudgery of her days but the love and the hurt of them, too. For Alfonso Cuarón, film is a rocket-ship of immersive perspective, hurling his captive audience into a reality unlike their own but entirely familiar and sympathetic too, with every measure of distance and time on the journey a vivid, moving landscape of fleeting eternity. Given this, Roma is his magnum opus, and a great, soulful machine of film.

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018; Directed by Rich Moore & Phil Johnston)

When we last saw that big lovable lug Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) six years ago, he seemed to have found his place in the world at last. Once a stereotyped and excluded building-smashing arcade game villain, Ralph earned the respect of his coded-as-good peers in his home game of Fix-It Felix Jr. and across the rest of Litwak’s Arcade by heroic and selflessly helping another pariah, the cutesy but spunky Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman), overcome a recurring nervous glitch and usurping monarch to regain her rightful place as the top performer in the candy-themed racing game Sugar Rush. Now Ralph and Vanellope are best friends, spending their off-hours together in Game Central Station, the main commuting hub of the arcade for video-game characters, sipping root beer in the bar from Tapper and watching the sun come up through the plug holes of their familiar power-bar terminal.

Ralph is loyal and big-hearted but a bit simple, so the repetition of life in the arcade suits him more than it does the bright, restless, and competitive Vanellope. When she expresses boredom at the prospect of racing along the same three track in Sugar Rush indefinitely, Ralph comes to her aid by punching a new course through the game’s saccharine landscape. Vanellope is thrilled at the new challenge, but her freewheeling navigation of Ralph’s course frustrates her human player outside in the arcade and leads to a broken part on the Sugar Rush machine that cannot be cheaply replaced. Sugar Rush is shut down, leaving Vanellope, her fellow racers, and the supporting characters in the game homeless, and Ralph feeling that he is to blame.

Moving through this surprisingly deft pixelated analogy for contemporary refugee crises (the other racer girls are adopted by Fix-It Felix Jr. and his tough-talking alien-shooting-game partner Calhoun, voiced by Jack McBrayer and Jane Lynch respectively, in a parenthetical subplot consisting of a few parenting jokes), Ralph and Vanellope decide to try to save Sugar Rush by venturing through the arcade’s new Wifi router into the vast gleaming city-of-the-future of the Internet, where they hope to purchase the last available replacement steering wheel for Sugar Rush from eBay before the machine is sold off for parts and Vanellope and her fellow racers are left permanently homeless. But their quest will lead to an irrevocable change in their friendship when Vanellope comes across a tantalizing, challenging online open-world driving game called Slaughter Race and Ralph proves reluctant to let his friend follow her dreams there when they appear likely to separate her from him.

If Wreck-It Ralph peppered its narrative of outcasts overcoming exclusionary labels with vintage video game references and character cameos, then its sequel colours its story about accepting change and space in human relationships with a cascade of nods and winks to online culture, internet memes, major websites, and tech companies. The gags are imaginative and rapid-fire: web surfers are personified as squarish avatars which zip along in flying-car-like pods on information superhighways; Twitter is a twisting, towering tree forest, with thousands of tiny blue birds literally re-tweeting each other’s utterances; Instagram is envisioned as a huge art museum, with avatars gazing thoughtfully at snaps of plated food; motormouthed hustlers bustle about with their garish pop-up ads, only to be knocked away by g-man-like adblockers; down at street level is the dimly-lit, seedy Dark Web, with disreputable shops selling viruses and other not-exactly-legal goods and services are for sale; not far from there is a graveyard of past computer networking mainstays like public chatrooms and phone-line dial-up.

Some Internet locations are more detailed than others, as they play a key role in the plot. Google-esque search engine Knowmore features a professorial librarian (Alan Tudyk, who voiced a character in the first film too) who breathless attempts to autocomplete surfers’ hesitant searches. eBay is a vast series of physical auctions booths. Slaughter Race is a tough-as-nails, skull-tattoo-emblazoned, semi-post-apocalyptic urban wasteland gamescape, a Grand Theft Auto-like MMORPG presided over by master wheelwoman and gang queen Shank (Gal Gadot). Vanellope and Ralph try to earn the eBay auction payment money for the Sugar Rush part by stealing Shank’s car; they do not succeed, but the kid’s driving skills impress Shank and the unpredictable setting appeals to Vanellope, precipitating her ambition to move to the game and the pending friendship schism with a clingy Ralph.

Ralph then becomes a viral star at YouTube-like video upload site BuzzzTube with the help of Shank’s hip and savvy bud Yes (Taraji P. Henson) in an effort to raise the necessary funds to pay for their eBay bid, hoovering up heart-shaped likes with ghost-pepper challenges and photoshopped screaming goats and bee puns. But Vanellope, trawling for hits and likes for Ralph’s videos, ventures into the gigantic castle-shaped website of the film’s producing and distributing studio, Disney. In between cartoon cameos from the studio’s many properties from classic animated characters to Marvel superheroes (I Am Groot jokes, ahoy!) and a pursuit by Star Wars stormtroopers, Vanellope happens upon a dressing room full of Disney princesses (many of whom are voiced by the actresses who played them in their original films).

There follows a pretty funny and sharp critical analysis (over the first minute of the linked clip only) of the studio’s common princess tropes: “Do animals talk to you?” the princesses ask Vanellope. “Were you poisoned? Cursed? Kidnapped and enslaved? Did people assume all of your problems got solved because a big, strong man showed up?” The princesses share with Vanellope their favoured method of self-reflection and dream-fulfillment: gaze thoughtfully into a body of water (“IMPORTANT water!”) and sing about their heart’s desire. After a false start or two, Vanellope pours out her yearning to explore an exciting new game realm in a hilarious showpiece musical number, “A Place Called Slaughter Race” (lyrics by Disney musical maven Alan Menken, no less!). This sequence’s humour largely stems from the incongruity of the visual and aural language of Disney Animation musical aspiration being applied to a hardcore car-battle game set in an atmosphere of gritty, lawless urban decay (dumpster fires, clouds of mace, a pigeon with one foot, a dollar store, etc.). Wreck-It Ralph showed a keener eye than its sequel for American class subtext, but this sequence at least gestures with a softened satirical glance towards the consequences of socioeconomic inequality and to its exploitative caricaturing in media like Rockstar’s GTA games.

Vanellope’s big strong man is not sufficiently supportive of her dreams, however, and Ralph’s insecure and possessive behaviour towards his friend drives Ralph Breaks the Internet to its narrative, emotional and thematic climax (the following discussion of which will spoil the rest of the film, FYI). In between its arcade-classic shout-outs and candy-coated whimsy, Wreck-It Ralph included resonant themes about the powerful and the marginalized, about the dangers of stereotypes, about sacrificing individuality for order, liberty for security, along the terms of what we call the social contract (and by “we”, I of course mean “Thomas Hobbes”). Ralph Breaks the Internet pivots with surprising emotional clarity and power to issues of psychological insecurity. Vanellope’s scrambled-code “glitch” now manifests when she feels anxious, a deft visual marker of the emotional condition.

But it’s Ralph’s masculine insecurities, his anxiety at losing his new best friend and being left alone again (understandable to an extent, given his outcast history in his game home), that predominate. It leads him to hijack Vanellope’s move to Slaughter Race with a virus named Arthur (provided to him by a Dark Web underworld blob creature given a Cockney gangster voice by Alfred Molina) that preys on and endlessly copies insecurities in programs, which first crashes Slaughter Race by replicating Vanellope’s glitch and then threatens the entirety of the Internet by producing hordes of needy, clingy Ralph clones. They swarm to topple monolithic buildings/sites like Amazon and then combine to form a King Kong-ish Big Ralph made up of Little Ralphs whose rampaging sparks a final emotional reckoning in Vanellope and Ralph’s friendship.

This surprisingly powerful climax blends emotional and thematic arcs with notable visual invention in the animation in an impressively cohesive manner. In this way, Ralph Breaks the Internet makes a strong point about unhealthy behaviour in relationships, about how poisonous possessiveness is driven by insecurity and fear of change and uncertainty. Although these themes and ideas are not connected directly and openly to displays of online toxic masculinity (Ralph does have a sad moment when he stumbles upon the mean comments about his BuzzzTube videos, but these are not gendered particularly) and their more broad effects, this is after all a movie with “Internet” in its title that suggests rather pointedly that poorly-coped-with male insecurity can be catastrophic at the micro and macro levels. Crucially, the resolution in the conflict at the heart of Ralph and Vanellope’s friendship in this movie is achieved not through accommodation and sacrifice on the female side of the equation, but through behaviour adjustments and psychological checks on the part of the male side, through the acceptance, albeit one tinged with melancholy, of uncertainty, lack of security, and separation from the ones you love.

Animated features are often manifested didactically, and cynical observers might even label them forms of ideological brainwashing of impressionable youth. However one approaches them, the best and most thought-out among them are not merely entertainment but texts of education, embedding emotional and ideological messages of worth to their young audience. Taken in this way, Ralph Breaks the Internet contains vital and potently expressed ideas about problematic behaviour in friendships and, by extension though not in this text itself about the connection between an adult man and a female child, in more adult relationships and social interactions as well.

The movie also contains many hallmarks of kid-focused entertainment: the script includes numerous re-orientating restatements of plot goals, launches with abandon into its many adventurous picaresque episodes at the expense of narrative pacing, and leaves aside or simply forgets some introduced elements. Its brand-name saturation and corporate synergy feels right for our contemporary post-capitalist reality but might honestly be a bit too much, especially with the relative lack of critique in that regard. There are also some burping jokes which I suppose children will love. Ralph Breaks the Internet is hardly perfect, but it features the considered sophistication and deeply-workshopped strength of narrative, thematic, and visual elements that one has come to expect from big-budget, high-level animated features, especially those under the Disney aegis. And if it teaches even one male child to avoid the emotional and social pitfalls of Disney’s numerous toxic, chauvinistic MRA-adjacent online critics, then it has provided an important service beyond a couple hours’ worth of solid diversion and entertainment.

The Other Side of the Wind (2018; Directed by Orson Welles)

The filmic ouevre of Orson Welles was made to be written about, obsessively, rapturously, and above all inconclusively. Few other filmmakers have imbued their movies with so much of themselves, their ideas and beliefs and humour and pathos and tragedy and impossibly grandiose spirit. Welles balked at the thought of observers analyzing him through his films, but if he really felt that way, then he ought not to have poured so much of himself into them, filling them up like empty jars with kerosene and dropping in a lit match just to see what happens. Ultimately, even if he did not intend to make every film an extension of and commentary on his own richly-lived life, he couldn’t help himself. Orson Welles made movies as he lived: with all-consuming abandon and a completely voracious and unquenchable appetite.

When he finished those films, they were full to the brim with his boundless perfectionist energy, and thus were usually boundless, energetic perfectionist masterpieces. But he often did not finish them, for myriad reasons that tended to run towards the financial, practical, and even legal but were forever psychoanalytically diagnosed as deriving from the flaws of his own genius-level ambition or by-products of his enigmatic personality. Though a product of his times in a way that no film artist of our own era could possible be in the same way (one can just barely imagine a millennial Orson Welles today making a couple of brilliant Sundance-circuit indies before being signed on to make a Marvel movie; he’d make a pretty good one, too, probably, though might not get a chance to make a second), Welles’ epoch between the late 1930s and the start of the 1980s was in many ways the absolute wrong one for a filmmaker of his artistic predilections and methods. These decades comprised the golden age of Hollywood’s studio system, the rise of the European New Wave, then American film’s stunning metamorphosis under the influence of those works and of domestic social, cultural, artistic, and commercial forces. At every step, Welles found himself outside of not only the predominant trends and practices of the film mainstream but of its alternative, independent strands as well: his ambitions were too marginal for big-budget, profit-centric studio films and too grand for small, patchily-funded indies.

The Other Side of the Wind is probably Orson Welles’ most famous unfinished film, and was conceived and semi-executed by Welles self-reflexively and self-reflectively as a celluloid metaphor for the the themes and frustrations of his career, for his bemusement at his place in film history and at film history itself, and for the magic and the deceit of the movies. Conceived through the 1960s and filmed off and on from 1970 to 1976, The Other Side of the Wind has been mired in financial and legal disputes for 40 years which have involved unreliable producers, restrictions of French law, and the Iranian Revolution (the deposed Shah’s brother-in-law provided funding for the film, believe it or not). Now, finally, those issues have been sorted out, an edit and sound mix of the film completed, and Orson Welles’ final film, uncompleted and unreleased upon his death in 1985, can be streamed on Netflix alongside that Sabrina the Teenage Witch show, just as its creator intended.

The resulting finished product is part dated time capsule, part living, electrifying reclaimed masterwork, and all Orson Welles. The Other Side of the Wind takes Welles’ trademarked winking masked-autobiographical artistic themes and runs them to dizzying extremes. It’s the story of the final day of the life of a great, celebrated film director, J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (the magnificently craggy, stone-hewn John Huston). Hannaford, who made some classic films years ago in Hollywood but has built his reputation among cinephiles during creative exile in Europe before his swan-song return to the American cinema stage, is an obvious metaphorical stand-in for Welles himself, combined with the aggressive performative masculinity of Welles’ old Spanish-bullfight-enthusiast buddy Ernest Hemingway, whose death in 1961 was the spark that lit the film’s creative fuse in Welles’ tinder-dry mind.

The Other Side of the Wind introduces a dizzying array of characters (most of them based on then-current Hollywood figures that Welles knew and feuded with) who are travelling between the Paramount backlot and Hannaford’s desert home for a party celebrating the great auteur’s 70th birthday party, after which we are told that the man dies in a car crash that might be suicidal and might be accidental. These include Hannaford’s “mafia” of crew members, actors, and sundry hangers-on, other filmmakers (including cameos from French New Wave director Claude Chabrol, a stoned Dennis Hopper, now-disgraced CBS head exec Les Moonves, and a young Cameron Crowe), critics (including one based on Welles antagonist Pauline Kael, played by Susan Strasberg), and a gaggle of “film-freak” cineastes craving even the slightest snippet of brilliance from the great man (and dropping bitingly funny over-educated observations on his work like “the ontology of his iconography is so facile”).

Many of these film freaks are filming Hannaford and his entourage with handheld cameras, and therefore the party section of the film is presented as a mockumentary, furiously, energetically quick-cut between different lengths and grains of film. Like much of what Welles did in his films, this stylistic technique is now common practice but must have seemed, in the 1970s, revolutionary and strange. This mockumentary part of the film is contrasted with footage from Hannaford’s final film, a film-within-the-film also called “The Other Side of the Wind”, which is first screened for a dismissive Hollywood exec (Geoffrey Land, based on then-head of Paramount Robert Evans) and then shown in snippets during the party at Hannaford’s manse.

“The Other Side of the Wind” (the film inside The Other Side of the Wind, that is) is an aimlessly plotless experimental art film, a conscious parody of European New Wave movies about a young male drifter, played by Hannaford’s hand-picked lead John Dale (Robert Random), who desirously follows a sensuous, exotic, barely-clothed woman (referred to as a “Red Indian” by characters at the party, she is played by Croatian artist Oja Kadar, then Welles’ lover and partner) through blasted, post-apocalyptic locations and ruined backlot sets. Dale is conspicuously absent at Hannaford’s party (it’s suggested, with latent homoerotic whispers, that the director has used up and discarded many leading men in his time), and is replaced instead by a couple dozen dummies in the actor’s likeness perched on rocks above the pool like ravens of repressed reminder. Huston and Kadar shoot holes in the dummies with guns late in the film. The New Wave send-ups elsewhere in the film range from an unseen production in-joke (the Arizona home where most of Hannaford’s party was shot stood right next to a house blown up at the end of New Waver Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point) to openly droll mockery (a tangent of punchlines and puns name-dropping Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and other luminaries of the movement).

If The Other Side of the Wind already sounds mind-bogglingly meta, rest assured that we have barely scratched the surface of how meta it is. Hannaford’s more-successful directorial protégé Brooks Otterlake is played by Peter Bogdanovich, who was, in the early 1970s, Welles’ more-successful directorial protégé. The character was originally played by impressionist Rich Little doing a Bogdanovich impersonation, but scheduling conflicts led to Little’s scenes being scrapped and Bogdanovich playing his own barely-fictionalized proxy. Welles plucked a blond waitress (Cathy Lucas) who couldn’t act to play a thinly-veiled version of Bogdanovich’s then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd, and ends the party with a moment of betrayal between Hannaford and Otterlake that presaged a public falling-out between Welles and Bogdanovich (though Bogdanovich executive produces the finished film, and was instrumental in its eventual release). The scene in which Hannaford’s candy-sucking toady Billy Boyle (Norman Foster, in an apparent reference to aged-out former child star Mickey Rooney) screens footage from the unfinished “The Other Side of the Wind” for the doubtful studio exec in an attempt to secure the funding to finish it was shown by Welles himself at his American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award event in an attempt to secure funding to finish The Other Side of the Wind. Neither showcase worked. One nearly requires a flowchart to keep track of it all.

If The Other Side of the Wind sounds like an impenetrable thicket of inside references, art-film winks and nods, and intellectual navel-gazing, it’s not (only) that. This is the most kinetic, lively film that Welles ever made, largely because his chosen satirical targets required him to depart from from his usual style of directing, shot-making, and editing to either ape styles unlike his own (the New Wave stuff) or innovate entire new ones (the constantly intercutting, immediate mockumentary style) to achieve what he needed to. The Hannaford party scenes are a stunning flood of bon mots about Hannaford’s (and thus Welles’) life and work and about movies and Hollywood and humanity in general, each one cleverer than even the cleverest snatch of dialogue in a dozen other movies and also presented by Welles as taking the piss out of people impressed by such bon mots.

And even if “The Other Side of the Wind” is intended as a film-within-a-film send-up of Bergman-esque experiential art films, it’s better than all but the best of those films at being that. Its shots are wondrously composed, each frame a pure artistic creation by Welles and his cameraman/cinematographer Gary Graver (who shot B-movies and even porn films to make enough money to allow him to keep working with Welles on this movie). There are many beguiling reflection, mirror, and window shots of Dale’s pursuit of the woman (again, for a director who resisted the suggestion that his movies were mirrors on his own life, Welles constantly used and indeed mastered the symbolically charged use of mirrors in cinematography). There’s a bathroom orgy sequence, and an erotically impressionistic sex scene in a car on a rainy night (an incredible, gorgeous sequence which was among the AV Club’s film scenes of the year). Welles was a bit of a prude with his films, and considered sexuality and nudity to be unnecessary distractions from the fundaments of the narrative, but in copying the explicit content of New Wave film, he opens the floodgates on a rampant sensuality that was previously compressed into his camera’s voyeuristic gaze. “Is cinema a phallus?” one of the film freaks asks Hannaford at one point, and for Welles, it certainly is in this scene.

Most of all, The Other Side of the Wind sounds like a mess, but it isn’t. Or it is, but in a focused, intentional way that always makes perfect sense and always has its well-considered reasons. As is demonstrated (along with many of the other details of the production and Welles’ thinking about the film) in Morgan Neville’s documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead which accompanied the film’s Netflix release, Welles worked in a manner that often seemed haphazard or improvised (a criticism also levelled at Hannaford in the film), preferring to leave room for serendipitous moments of magic that were the heart of filmmaker for him (which he called “divine accidents”). He could also be cryptic or poetically vague when describing what his films were to be about: “This film is about the love of death”, he said of The Other Side of the Wind (the title itself is entirely cryptic, too), not exactly a pitch finely-tuned to appeal to a studio suit concerned with box office grosses.

But Welles always had a clear idea in his own capacious brain of what the final film should look like, even if his inability or (more likely) unwillingness to share the entirety of that vision with his collaborators could prove damagingly frustrating. Is this final, released version of The Other Side of the Wind, based on some of the master’s own rough assemblies and surviving instructions and guidelines, the film Orson Welles had in his head before he died? Of course we can’t know. But as a document of a master filmmaker’s obsessions and frustrations, of his craft and his humour and his aesthetic prankster’s energy, The Other Side of the Wind is tremendous.

This film might have come to life as a tiresome inside joke about the Hollywood glitterati who showered him with praise and awards for his past work but wouldn’t pony up for his future work, the talented young filmmakers who worshipped him while borrowing his techniques and style and surpassing his commercial success, the cinephiles who embalmed his achievements with self-serving treatises but did not create films of their own (Bogdanovich did the first before doing the second, typifying Welles’ appreciation and resentment of his young acolyte). But instead this film is a deceptively ambitious closing statement on a remarkable, turbulent career in filmmaking, a masterpiece about reaching your end with your self-critical faculties firing at all cylinders but with your legacy in doubt and ultimately in the hands of others, who will inevitably betray you in ways both small and large, unintentional and malicious, sadly unjust and entirely deserved. It’s a film about failure and tragedy, and it’s a gigantic, inspiring success. Whatever the particulars, that much had to be the intent of Orson Welles with The Other Side of the Wind, at the very least.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018; Directed by Christopher McQuarrie)

As star of the Mission: Impossible movies, Tom Cruise has a way of winning begrudging admiration for bluntly effective single-use instruments. Not every actor is a Swiss army knife in the manner of Daniel Day-Lewis or Cate Blanchett or Christian Bale or Meryl Streep, capable of performing convincing Method-ish transformations into any number of roles, historical figures, or human archetypes (heck, the vast majority of thespians are not). Neither is every actor capable of transforming convincing into a human being at all, of tapping believably into that swirling cocktail of hopes and fears and flaws and weird persisting beauty that unites all of us intelligent limited-hair apes in our uncomfortable shared carpool on this ailing planet.

You don’t look to Tom Cruise for any of those things. For a time, Cruise and the filmmakers he worked with entertained notions that realistic nuance, empathy, and believable human emotion in general were things that he could do. Smart, canny filmmakers did employ Cruise in roles that turned his oppressive image and limited range to their films’ advantage: Paul Thomas Anderson found cracked-facade pathos in Cruise’s aggressive performative masculinity for Magnolia, Ben Stiller turned that same quality to absurd self-parodying comic heights in Tropic Thunder, and that most penetratively perceptive of film auteurs, Stanley Kubrick, used Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s then-fracturing semi-sham of a marriage as raw material for his final film about a fracturing semi-sham of a marriage, Eyes Wide Shut.

But somewhere between these sort of roles and the public humiliation of the revelation of the depths of weirdness surrounding Cruise’s involvement in the Church of Scientology, and around the time Cruise turned 50, he seems to have decided to embrace his chosen calling as a ridiculously, inhumanly driven action-movie avatar. With the certain wisdom of age and experience and perhaps also with the acquired self-perception of the ravenous devourer of film that his reputation has painted him as, Cruise has accepted that he will always be at his best fighting and shooting guns and driving cars really fast and, yes, running really hard, with brief interludes of concentrated examination of electronic info-screens, comic banter with sidekicks, and tearful scenes with female (always female, and don’t you forget it!) love interests. This is what Tom Cruise was meant to do. He’s going to do it and you’d better like it.

This is why a superior espionage-action blockbuster like Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the ideal vehicle for Cruise at this point of his career, and maybe at any point. It reduces his functions as a performer to just those which he is successful at, as enumerated above, at the exclusion of any others that he may be tempted to try his hand at, most likely less successfully. As producer of Fallout as well as its star, Cruise can apply the obsessive-compulsive drive so fully embodied in that famous all-out sprint of his (which he does in this film over London rooftops with a broken ankle, as if for emphasis) to a full production. Along with key collaborating director Christopher McQuarrie (who also helmed the last M:I film, Rogue Nation and Cruise’s Jack Reacher vehicle), Cruise sees to it that Fallout is, like himself, a singular-focused blunt instrument of pure, unalloyed big-budget entertainment.

Fallout follows Rogue Nation with what I take to be some measure of narrative continuity; I can’t say so from personal experience, having not seen that last installment (truth be told, I’ve only seen Brad Bird’s kinetic Ghost Protocol and Brian DePalma’s franchise opener, but this is the kind of franchise you can drop in and out of without missing much in the way of context). Cruise’s fellow Impossible Missions Force (IMF) squad members – Simon Pegg’s Benji and Ving Rhames’ Luther, as well as bossman Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) – return, as does sometimes-ally and former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and anarcho-terrorist antagonist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris, a far more intense and compelling actor than this material deserves). Lane’s shadowy network of terroristic Apostles have evidently stolen plutonium cores and have the means to install it in nuclear devices that they plan to set off somewhere in the world. Joined by CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill, an object so blunt as to make Cruise seem complex and sophisticated in comparison), Cruise’s super-agent Ethan Hunt must stop the nuclear plot in a globe-trotting adventure from Berlin to Paris to London to the mountains of Kashmir (the latter actually shot in New Zealand).

There’s piles of spy movie standbys on display, double- and triple-crosses (sometimes in the same scene) and disguises and rendezvous with femmes fatale (namely Vanessa Kirby’s inscrutable White Widow) and digital readout bomb countdowns and fleeting digressions on the ethics of taking a life to save hundreds, thousands, or millions more. But the reason you’ll want to see Fallout is for its utterly spectacular, bar-raising action sequences, mostly achieved with old-fashioned practical rigs and absolutely next-level stunt work, per Cruise’s fanatical insistence on realism. Cruise leads from the front in the matters, for example having trained relentlessly so that he could himself perform a HALO skydive over Paris for a white-knuckle aerial sequence early in the film (the camera operator leaps with him, leading to a stunning shot as Cruise follows the plunging camera out the back of the airplane).

The HALO jump scene only scratches the surface of Fallout‘s incredible action. A bruising, exclamatory dust-up in a bathroom pitting Hunt and Walker against Liang Yang’s supposed extremist agent John Lark features some remarkable fight choreography. A climactic helicopter chase over snowy peaks (with Cruise flying the chopper himself, because of course he does) manages to be tense and exciting, which you might not think would be possible for that particular type of aerial conveyance but assuredly is (do a hang-glider chase next!). Two consecutive car-and-motorcycle chases through the streets of Paris seem almost like footnotes to mention after the high quality of the rest of the action, but the first one in particular deserves to be ranked among the best vehicular pursuit sequences in cinematic history.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout likewise demands attention as a candidate for one of the finest pure action blockbusters ever created, and producer and star Tom Cruise deserves ample credit for that. The man takes a lot of guff as a performer and public figure, and this review has been no exception. But kudos are also due for what he does well: entertain the captive masses as an action figure of singular focus and directness. Fallout has just enough plot to cohere as a movie and just enough in its head and its heart not to lose our attention in between its riveting action spectacles. It doesn’t bother with much else, nor should it. Like Tom Cruise, when it’s time to run, this movie breaks into a full sprint. Let’s appreciate the dedication to the craft of hitting that big nail square on the head as hard as possible. It’s not as easy as it might seem.